Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

When the unwearied but thirsty colonists were lucky enough to have a run of 20-below-zero (–29°C) nights, the applejack would reach a 27 percent concentration of alcohol. That’s 54 proof, which was perfectly adequate for warming the cockles (whatever they are) of their hearts until spring.

Cider Sauce

This sauce is equally at home with the flavors of a roasted pork loin or warm gingerbread. You can make it with either hard or “soft” cider. If you use the hard stuff, some of the alcohol will remain in the sauce.

1 cup apple cider or apple juice

1/3 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Pinch of ground cloves

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 tablespoon water

1.In a 1-quart saucepan, combine the cider or juice, brown sugar, butter, lemon juice, and cloves. Place over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture comes to a full boil. Boil for 3 minutes or until somewhat reduced.

2.In a small bowl, mix together the cornstarch and water. Stir the starch mixture into the hot cider mixture. Continue cooking, stirring constantly, for 1 to 2 minutes, or until the sauce has thickened. Serve warm.

MAKES 1 GENEROUS CUP

CASHEW! GESUNDHEIT!

I like to buy raw cashew nuts at a health-food store. I sometimes pulverize them to make a tasty milk. But my daughter came home from school telling me that cashew nuts contain a highly corrosive, toxic substance and that they must never be eaten raw. Health food?!

The succulent “fruits” of the tropical cashew tree Anacardium occidentale , often called cashew apples, are about the size and shape of a pear. They are not only edible but quite delicious. Since they are highly perishable, however, you won’t find them very far from the trees. I was lucky enough to taste them when I lived in Venezuela, where they grow and are called merey .

A “cashew apple” on the tropical cashew tree, Anacardium occidentale . The edible “apple” is known as merey in Venezuela, cajueiro in Brazil, and marañón in most of the rest of Latin America. The cashew “nut” (botanically, the fruit) is inside the lower, kidney-shaped appendage.

Attached to the “apple” at its lower end is the kidney-shaped nut (which, botanically speaking, is actually the fruit), encased in a double shell. Between the shells is a gummy phenolic resin containing the corrosive and poisonous chemicals anacardic acid and cardol, among others. If eaten, this resin would actually cause blisters in the mouth.

Obviously, the poisons must be removed before the nuts are safe to eat. This is accomplished by roasting the unshelled nuts in hot oil, which does two things: it drives off the resins, and it makes the shells brittle enough to crack by hand with a mallet, a method that continues to survive into the twenty-first century. Both the shells and the corrosive chemicals are long gone before you ever see them in the store.

The nuts are perfectly edible at this stage, and are sold as “raw cashews” in spite of the fact that they have already been cooked at 365 to 375°F (185 to 190°C). Commercially packaged cashews are usually roasted again at 325°F (163°C); this roasting softens them and enhances their color and buttery flavor.

Those raw-foods-only restaurants and other raw-food devotees who insist that food must never be allowed to exceed 118°F (48°C) make frequent use of “raw” cashew nuts and “raw” cashew butter in their creations. Either they’re kidding themselves or they don’t know that their nuts were roasted at a much higher temperature long before they saw them.

Chapter Five

For Amber Waves of Grain

IT MAY seem strange that after two chapters on agricultural crops that supply us with our vegetables and fruits, I now turn to the cultivation of grass. And I don’t mean what some readers might think.

Nor am I referring to the hundreds of square miles of home-encircling green carpet that we plant, water, fertilize, spray, manicure and trim, only to harvest the top inch time and time again and throw it away. (Futility, thy name is lawn.) And don’t get me started on the wastefulness of golf courses, especially in the water-starved desert regions of our country.

No, by “grass” I’m referring to cereal grasses, the family of plants that, more than any other, feeds the world. Also called grains, cereal grasses supply us with the starchy, edible seeds we treasure: wheat, rice, rye, oats, barley, and corn. Not only do these six plants sustain most of the world’s human population, but they feed the cattle and poultry who turn them into meat. Grains are the most ancient and still the most important of all food crops.

Wheat is probably the oldest. It is still a widely cultivated grain, with a worldwide annual production (in 2003) of 556 million metric tons. It is surpassed by rice, at 589 million metric tons, 90 percent of which is grown in Asia. But the world’s champion is corn (maize), with 638 million tons being produced in 2003. All other grains (barley, rye, oats, and sorghum), known as coarse grains, total another 242 million metric tons worldwide. (Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT.)

The most important nutritional feature of all grains is their starchiness. Starch is, of course, a carbohydrate, as are its building blocks, the sugars. So speaking chemically rather than agriculturally, this chapter might more broadly, if also more textbookily, be titled “Carbohydrates,” whether from grains, legumes, or, in the case of honey, insects.

In that vein, allow me to set the stage with a Sidebar Science on carbohydrate chemistry which, as with all sidebars, may be scanned, skimmed, or skipped.

Sidebar Science: A nano-course on carbohydrates

THE MOLECULESof all carbohydrates—sugars and starches—are made up of anywhere from two to hundreds or even thousands of molecules of glucose, all joined together. As the number of glucose units per molecule increases from a few to dozens or hundreds, we cross the rather fuzzy borderline between sugars and starches.

• Monosaccharides:Its name derived from the Greek mono , meaning one or single, and sakcharon , meaning sugar, a monosaccharide is a basic “sugar unit” whose molecules cannot be broken down (by hydrolysis ) into any simpler sugars. Monosaccharides are the smallest of carbohydrate molecules. The most common ones are glucose, fructose, and galactose. (See Table 4 on chapter 5.)

Glucose is the ultimate, energy-giving breakdown product of all the carbohydrates we eat. It can go directly into the bloodstream.

• Disaccharides:Table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide (“two sugars”); its molecules are made up of one molecule each of glucose and fructose, the very sweet simple sugar found in fruits. When treated either with an acid or with the enzyme invertase , the sucrose molecule breaks down into a mixture of equal amounts of its glucose and fructose parts. The resulting mixture is called invert sugar and is, surprisingly, sweeter than sucrose itself because fructose is sweeter than sucrose.

This illustrates a fundamental principle of chemistry: A chemical compound (sucrose, for example) can have very different properties from a simple mixture of its components (a mixture of glucose and fructose, for example). The obligatory chemistry-textbook example is sodium chloride (table salt), which we eat with impunity despite its being composed of a metal that explodes in water (sodium) and a poisonous gas (chlorine).